No, your eyes aren't deceiving you - we have actually have not one, but two news items on hobby/small operating systems on the same day! You thought the day would never come again, but hey, here we are. You're welcome. Now, what are we talking about? FreeDOS - a test release has been, uh, released for FreeDOS 1.1.

I have to agree this is GREAT news, and not just for those that like to play with funky and offbeat OSes as freeDOS is used in several commercial applications. One that wasn't listed in TFA is the excellent Spinrite, which allows you to bypass the OS on a damaged or failing drive thanks to FreeDOS and often recover the data.

I can't count how mant times at the shop I'd have a drive that was supposedly DOA when in reality for one reason or another Windows simply refused to mark a handful of bad sectors as such and would instead dump OS data on them, thus causing crashes. Thanks to freeDOS and Spinrite I was able to let Spinrite mark those few sectors as bad and now those drives make reliable portadrives in cheap USB enclosures. Thanks FreeDOS!

I can't count how mant times at the shop I'd have a drive that was supposedly DOA when in reality for one reason or another Windows simply refused to mark a handful of bad sectors as such and would instead dump OS data on them, thus causing crashes.

a new drive with bad sectors (visible to the OS and not dealed with by the drives firmware) is DOA .

Actually I'd say you are wrong, and here is why: All drives are designed to deal with a few bad sectors, that is why there is extra space on the drive you can't access. it is there to replace a failed sector or two.

Now what I have found is that for some reason on certain drives (cough cough Seagate cough) you seem to be more likely to get those few failed sectors towards the front of the drive and for some reason Windows simply refuses to mark them as bad. With Spinrite marking those sectors as bad the drive works fine, SMART checks out, all is green. In fact when my nephews HDD died I gave him one of those drives with a couple of bad sectors as a temp until I could get him another drive. That was two years ago and the drive is still running like a champ.

So we aren't talking about a drive with Gbs of space marked bad, we are talking a couple of Kb at most. I've found with SMART you'll get plenty of warning if the drive really starts to fail but with a few bad sectors they can go for years and years just humming along. As I said I use cheap USB enclosures with most of those that are of any decent size with that problem that comes into my shop and so far they are transferring files and running on relative's Nboxes just as sweet as sweet can be, YMMV of course.